The fight between Russia and Ukraine is now in its fifth month, and it’s getting worse every day. Even though they are outgunned and outnumbered, Ukrainian troops are using everything they have to stop the Russian Federation from taking over.
Six powerful weapons were sent.
Defense Post says that French President Emmanuel Macron said earlier this month that France would send six more long-range self-propelled “Caesar” howitzers to Ukraine to help with this conflict.
“On top of the 12 Caesars that have already been sent, I decided to send six more Caesars in the coming weeks,” Macron said at a news conference. The heavy artillery system is admired for how well it works.
A system that is easy to move and move around
A week before Macron’s speech, Ukraine showed the weapon to journalists, including AFP, to show how useful it was. The commander of the new system, who only wanted to be known as “Glib,” told AFP that the weapon helped make Ukraine’s defenses more flexible.
“This system is mostly very mobile and easy to move around,” he said.
The French company Nexter has been making these Caesar howitzers on trucks for a long time. They have been used in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mali in the past. But they should give the Ukrainian troops a big advantage.
Move and fire
The main thing about them is that users can shoot and move away quickly. This means that the target doesn’t have time to find where the shells are coming from so it can fire back.
The truck-mounted weapons are 33 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 12 feet high. They weigh a whopping 19.5 tons and have guns mounted on a 66 truck with a 245-horsepower engine that lets them reach a top speed of 50 mph on the road and more than 31 mph off the road. They have a great cruising range of 373 miles, but they can still fit in a transport plane to be flown into war zones.
Four or five soldiers are needed to use the weapons. A gun-layer must set the coordinates of the target using a map or a satellite positioning system (GPS) for the gun to work.
The weapon is then fired. At that point, the Caesar only needs 60 seconds to get ready to fire, and the 155mm/52 caliber ordnance semi-automatic gun needs even less time than that to fire six shells at a target 3 to 31 miles away.
Even more impressive is that the Caesar works the same way no matter what the weather is like, and that it can move out of the way of an enemy’s response in less than 40 seconds after the last shell has been fired.
The weapon could give Ukraine a big strategic edge and help it stand its ground and fight off Russian forces that are trying to take over.